Sky Digital a low bit rate mess

Ranicand

I have a nice new HD LCD television and used with a XBOX 360 and a HD DVD drive things look really nice.

Even regular DVD looks pretty while lacking the higher resolution they still has a nice high bit rate.

Many channels on Sky are shocking and the LCD and the size of the screen really seems to show this up.

I have the Sky+ box set wide 16:9 in RGB and while the menus look really crisp the channels are a blocky mess.

Some channels like RTE look a good bit better but channels like the Irish Sky One look very blocky.


That’s another thing I noticed channels that have an Irish version for adverts like Sky One Paramount ect all have very low bit rates.


What some people don’t seem to understand is weather you are watching HD or SD means very little if the bit rate is low.

I am thinking of getting Sky HD but I would like to ask what is the Bit rate like compared to HD DVD of Blu Ray?

Ranicand

Has nobody noticed the drop in the picture quality on many Sky channels?

Mossy Monk

The drop? It's been like that for years.

scart

ITV 1 2 3 & 4 broadcast on a very low bit rate. really annoying while trying to watch football on any of these channels. If match is on ITV1 i always switch to analogue...much better picture quality!

radiospan

It seems that UTV might be higher bitrate than ITV, which is always terrible.

Sky One and the MTV channels are very low bitrate too.

I think TG4 has one of the highest bitrates of the SD channels.

ethernet

The BBC bitrates seem rather good. EuroNews is really blocky at times too. Any sudden movement and you might as well be watching an animated Lego cartoon ...

cgarvey

ethernet wrote:

The BBC bitrates seem rather good.

BBC1/2 on 141/2 on the Irish EPG (presume they're the same BBC1/2?) are dreadful. Any dark scene I watch is flashing a grey pattern and is completely blotchy. The difference between Eastenders on RTE1 and BBC1 is more than enough to make it worthwhile watching on RTE with the ads!

TVDX

plazzTT wrote:

It seems that UTV might be higher bitrate than ITV, which is always terrible.

Sky One and the MTV channels are very low bitrate too.

I think TG4 has one of the highest bitrates of the SD channels.

Sky one Ireland has been terrible since launch and I actually use Sky one Uk in "other channels".
It was at it's worst when they were relaying Sky News Ireland and at times they would forget to switch the aspect ratio back and it would remain premanently stuck.
But right now, it looks godawful still.

TG4 may have a high bit rate but they still suffer from that RTE hue to the picture like what you might see on RTE news.

I find FIVE to be one of the best quality signals available.

L1011

Sky One Ireland was very good until Sky Three launched on the same txp, actually.

watty

Problem with LCD is it is fixed resolution (720x576, or 1366x 768 or 1920x1080 or what ever you have, some are PC resolutions).

Satellite can be 720, 704, 544 horizontally, (or 240 upscaled to 720 if one of six interactive stream in one frame) .
or 384 upscalled to 768!

Vertically 576 or upscalled 288, or even 480 (or upscalled 240) if NTSC source

animorphic or squarish pixel or 2:1 pixels (2 streams of interactive in one frame)

or even stranger resolutions upscaled in the Interactive feeds.

So even with DVD quality bitrate, it may look rubbish on an LCD or Plasma as these are FIXED resolution. CRT is variable resolution.

If you have full HD or better it helps for the non-DVD resolutions.

Then some channels have poor encoding, poor bit rate or both.

A misaligned Dish or badly skewed LNB increases errors which makes the picture have more artifacts (makes it look really low bitrate).
Bad encoder or bad alignment shows as artifacts even on slow moving scene. Low bit rate artifacts vanish on still or very slow moving shots and worst on fast movement or "busy" scenes, these are only a little worse if issue is poor encoder or bad alignment.

Ulsterman 1690

You could always try the UK version of Sky one or the "London region" of BBC1/2/ITV (via "other channels" menu)

They might be using a higher bitrate for these.

Ranicand

Ulsterman 1690 wrote:

You could always try the UK version of Sky one or the "London region" of BBC1/2/ITV (via "other channels" menu)

They might be using a higher bitrate for these.

That's a good idea thanks.

Raskolnikov

Is that why Setanta Sports is awful?

Lennoxschips

I usually watch ITV1 on ITV London or STV.

Used to watch Tyne Tees (cause that's what I had tuned in the first time) but noticed it was really blocky during a football match.

BigMoose

Funny enough I'm trying to watch the start of the Grand Prix and the weather's crap so my ITV1 reception is unwatchable but I've found Tyne Tees to be almost perfect! Will stick to that in crap weather for the time being

My 103 is West Midlands and both that and ITV London are unwatchable in this weather... Think my LNB needs a tweak but when on a ladder yesterday it wasn't obvious to me how to move the thing. Do I just twist hard and hope I dont break it? It's set at "6 o'clock" at the mo. Can I just force it round to 7 or 8 or whatever it should be?

Ulsterman 1690

the weather's crap so my ITV1 reception is unwatchable

Definitely sounds like a dish (or LNB) alignment problem

revileandy

I heard SKY had deliberately reduced bit-rates to encourage the switch to HD?????

Could be a load of waffle but I wouldn't put it past them

byte

Wouldn't surprise me, though it's possibly more down to the amount of crap niche channels and +1's etc sqeezed into muxes. The more sqeezed into a mux, the more noticeable the compression.

norbert64

Useful link
http://www.digitalbitrate.com/dbr.php?link=0&sat=319&lang=en

funnily enuf BBC1/2 NI are better than expected?

eirebhoy

tbh it really shouldn't be bad quality. I have 37" LCD and once I'm a 6 feet away the quality is excellent. The default settings on my TV were rubbish. It took me a good few hours to get the best settings. I just went onto the AVForums and tried out about 10 pages worth of recommended settings. Most settings were crap and I had to go through loads until I got a very good picture.